Part 1 (2/2)

”With her dress looking as it does?”

”There's no other way. I dunno.”

The agent was puzzled. ”I want a closer inspection of that wall.

We'll walk along this side.”

Both agent and constable started off, keeping well behind the wild hedge along the wall so that they might not be seen from the bluff road.

The man lying in the gra.s.s was more puzzled than the agent. Why a book agent and a constable should be so anxious about a lady who was--well, just charming--but who had herself stepped out of nowhere to join a priest in his walk, was a problem for some study. He got up and walked to the wall. Then he laughed. Close examination showed him marks in the giant tree, the vertical cuts being cleverly covered by the bark, while the horizontal ones had creepers festooned over them. A door was well concealed. But the tree? It was large, yet there could not be room in it for more than one person, who would have to stand upright and in a most uncomfortable position. The man himself had been before it over an hour. How long had the lady been in the tree? He forgot his lost cigar in trying to figure the problem out.

Mark Griffin had never liked problems. That was one reason why he found himself now located in a stuffy New England inn just at the end of the summer season when all the ”boarders” had gone except himself and the book agent.

Griffin himself, though the younger son of an Irish peer, had been born in England. The home ties were not strong and when his brother succeeded to the t.i.tle and estates in Ireland Mark, who had inherited a fortune from his mother, went to live with his powerful English relatives. For a while he thought of going into the army, but he knew he was a dunce in mathematics, so he soon gave up the idea. He tried Oxford, but failed there for the same reason. Then he just drifted.

Now, still on the sunny side of thirty-five, he was knocking about, sick of things, just existing, and fearfully bored. He had dropped into Siha.s.set through sheer curiosity--just to see a typical New England summer resort where the Yankee type had not yet entirely disappeared. Now that the season was over he simply did not care to pull out for New York and continue his trip to--nowhere. He was ”seeing” America. It might take months and it might take years. He did not care. Then England again by way of j.a.pan and Siberia--perhaps.

He never wanted to lose sight of that ”perhaps,” which was, after all, his only guarantee of independence.

Siberia suited Mark Griffin's present mood, which was to be alone. He had never married, never even been in love, at least, not since boyhood. Of course, that had been mere puppy love. Still, it was something to look back to and sigh over. He liked to think that he could still feel a sort of consoling sadness at the thought of it. He, a timid, dreaming boy, had loved a timid, dreaming girl. Her brother broke up the romance by taunting Mark who, with boyish bashfulness, avoided her after that. Then her parents moved to London and Mark was sent to school. After school he had traveled. For the last ten years England had been merely a place to think of as home. He had been in India, and South America, and Canada--up on the Yukon. He would have stayed there, but somebody suggested that he might be a remittance man.

Ye G.o.ds! a remittance man with ten thousand pounds a year! And who could have had much more, for Mark Griffin was a master with his pen.

His imagination glowed, and his travels had fanned it into flame.

Every day he wrote, but burned the product next morning. What was the use? He had plenty to live on. Why write another man out of a job?

And who could be a writer with an income of ten thousand pounds a year?

But, just the same, it added to Mark Griffin's self-hatred to think that it was the income that made him useless. Yet he had only one real failure checked against him--the one at Oxford. But he knew--and he did not deceive himself--why there had been no others. He had never tried.

But there was one thing in Mark's favor, too. In spite of his wandering, in spite of the men and women of all kinds he had met, he was clean. There was a something in the memory of his mother--and in the memory, too, of that puppy love of his--that had made him a fighter against himself.

”The great courage that is worth while before G.o.d,” his mother used to say, ”is the courage to run away from the temptation to be unclean. It is the only time you have the right to be a coward. That sort of cowardice is _true courage_.”

Besides her sweet face, that advice was the great s.h.i.+ning memory he had of his mother, and when he began to wander and meet temptations, he found himself treasuring it as his best and dearest memory of her.

True, he had missed her religion--had lost what little he had had of it--but he had kept her talisman to a clean life.

His lack of religion worried him, though he had really never known much about his family's form of it. For that his mother's death, early boarding school, and his father's worse than indifference, were responsible. But as he grew older he felt vaguely that he had missed something the quality of which he had but tasted through the one admonition of his mother that he had treasured. His nature was full of reverence. His soul burned to respond to the call of faith, but something rebelled. He had read everything, and was humble enough to acknowledge that he knew little. He had given up the struggle to believe. Nothing seemed satisfactory. It worried him to think that he had reached such a conclusion, but he was consoled by the thought that many men had been of his way of thinking. He hoped this would prove excuse enough, but found it was not excuse enough for him. Here he was, rich, n.o.ble, with the English scales of caste off his eyes, doing nothing, indolent, loving only a memory, indifferent but still seeing a saving something of his mother and his child love in every woman to whom he spoke.

Now something else, yet something not so very different, had suddenly stepped into his life, and he knew it. The something was dressed in white and had stepped out of a tree. It was almost laughable. This woman had come into his dreams. The very sight of her attracted him--or was it the manner of her coming? She was just like an ideal he had often made for himself. Few men meet even the one who looks like the ideal, but he had seen the reality--coming out of a tree. He kept on wondering how long she had been there. He himself had been dreaming in front of the tree an hour before he saw her. Had she seen him before she came out? She had given no sign; but if she had seen him, she had trusted him with a secret. Mark looked at the tree. It was half embedded in the wall. Then he understood. The tree masked a secret entrance to Killimaga.

He was still smiling over his discovery when he heard the voices of the agent and constable. They were coming back, so he dropped into his hiding place in the tall gra.s.s.

”Well, Brown,” the agent was saying, ”I am going to tackle her. I've got to see that face. It's the only way! If I saw it once, I'd know for sure from the photograph they sent me.”

”Ye'd better not,” advised the constable. ”She might be a-scared before--”

”But I've got to be sure,” interrupted the agent.

”Aw, ye're sure enough, ain't ye? There's the photygraft, and I seed her.”

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